Gateway P-171XL FX Edition Review

Posted by John P. on March 10th, 2008 Comments Printer-Friendly

Gateway P-171XL FX Edition

Gateway is a relatively newcomer to the gaming notebook spectrum of computers, but the product they have released is a great performer. Is it lacking anything compared to other gaming notebooks on the market? Read on to find out.

The P-171XL FX is a loaded notebook with an impressive Intel Core 2 Extreme processor running at 2.8GHz and dual 200GB 7200RPM hard drives with 16MB of cache. It also has a now outdated HD-DVD/DVD-RW drive (we would like to see Gateway build in a Blu-ray drive in the future). For graphics, the P-171XL FX has a NVIDIA GeForce Go 8800GTS with 512MB of GDDR3 memory. The notebook also has 3GB of DDR2 memory and a 9-cell battery. Surprisingly, this gaming notebook weighs in at just under 10 pounds. It’s not the heaviest notebook on the block, but it sure will put a strain on your shoulder if you’re traveling with it.

You’ll love to play games on the 17″ WUXGA display running at 1920×1200 resolution. Also integrated is a built-in 1.3 megapixel webcam, Intel 802.11a/b/g/n wireless networking, and a fingerprint reader. There’s also a lot of connectivity on this notebook, including: 3 USB 2.0 ports, VGA, HDMI, FireWire, and eSATA. eSATA being the first we’ve seen on a notebook. There is no DVI output however.

Gateway P-171XL FX Edition

In terms of cosmetics, the notebook has a black, silver, and orange color scheme, with most of the exterior made of plastic with brushed metal accents around the keyboard. The P-171XL FX runs Windows Vista Home Premium (why not Ultimate if you’re paying this much?) and has a full-size keyboard with a numerical pad. The trackpad was a little on the small side, but most gamers will want to plug in a separate gaming mouse for the best performance.

After plugging in the notebook and canceling all the bloatware offers, we immediately loaded our benchmarking applications onto the system, as well as a few games for testing the graphics power. First, we ran our standard PCMark Vantage test, and the P-171XL FX received a score of 3683 PCMarks which is excellent performance and impressive for a notebook. In our CINEBENCH tests, the P-171XL FX performed wonderfully, receiving a whopping 5191 in the multiple-core test, and a multiprocessor speedup of 1.89.

After benchmarking the system, we were ready to test the graphics power of the Gateway. We installed Call of Duty 4, cranked up the settings, and got to work. The P-171XL FX never skipped a beat and was constantly showing around 50-60 FPS. The speakers of the P-171XL FX were loud and powerful than most notebook speakers, but as expected, there wasn’t much low-end to the sound.

You probably won’t expect to run the P-171XL FX for that long on battery, we recieved around 2 1/2 hours on battery life with the screen dimmed. You can probably expect around half that while gaming on battery power.

Overall, the Gateway P-171XL FX Edition notebook is a great choice for gamers looking for a mid-priced gaming notebook (some are more expensive than this offering). It’s available today from Gateway starting at $1599 while our model costs $2999.

Pros